Nightmare Fuel / Ghost Camp

• Ghost Camp is one of the most distressing and legitimately terrifying of the original books for a few good reasons. Even Troy Steele, the blogger behind Blogger Beware, mentioned that it's the "closest a Goosebumps book has come to being scary."
  • Some of the pranks the campers pull include extreme bodily harm. One camper stabs himself in the neck with a fork and another has his foot impaled to the ground with a tent spike. Another extreme "joke" is Alex seeing an apparently dead girl floating at the bottom of the lake and trying to save her. The moment he gets her to shore she just spits water in his face and says she could hold her breath for a long time. Of course, Alex later learns he was right. She was dead. But the most terrifying prank is when a girl apparently gets her head knocked off by a stray soccer ball. What makes it even scarier? When Alex says to Harry, "I saw it, too."
  • The earliest hint that the kids are ghosts is when Lucy sticks her hand in the campfire to retrieve a hotdog she dropped and doesn't even react to it.
  • Harry and Alex are the only characters in this book who aren't dead. Everyone at Camp Spirit Moon besides them are ghosts, but even they don't know how or why they died. All Lucy says is that the fog rolled in one night when everyone was at the campfire, and when it departed, they were all dead. We're never given a reason as to why it happened or how the fog killed them, it just did.
  • Lucy and the others have no idea how long any of them have been dead, and are unable to leave the camp or it's said they'll disappear and become part of the fog. How did they come to gain this information? How many people tried to leave the camp? Does that mean the fog is made up of lost souls stuck in perpetual torment?
  • Elvis possessing Alex at the end, and we're never told if he ever left Alex's body or if he's still inside Alex. And imagine what that must mean for Harry, since it's likely no one will believe that his own brother is being controlled by a dead kid.
  • Just the cover itself is eerie and unsettling. A group of invisible campers save for their clothes walking in front of camp, while a lone human girl stares with a look of sheer terror and lightning flashes across the dark sky. And given the context of the story, it's entirely possible this is just a peek at some other poor victim whose story we will never know.